Sir Keir Starmer once observed that there are “parts of England you wouldn’t know were English.” This was presented as a lament about social cohesion. Sir Jim Ratcliffe, meanwhile, declared that England is being “colonised by immigrants,” which was presented as a lament about everything.
And thus we arrive at the Great British Tradition: two knights of the realm peering at the same country and insisting it’s disappearing — just from slightly different angles and vastly different tax arrangements.
Sir Keir’s version suggests certain high streets have become unrecognisable. Sir Jim’s suggests the entire island is one kebab shop away from surrender. The Prime Minister frowns at inflammatory language; the billionaire, phoning in from a sunnier fiscal climate, warns of national eclipse. One man governs the country. The other governs his residency status.
There is something magnificent about a tax exile worrying about territorial integrity. Nothing says “defend the homeland” like defending it from Monaco. Perhaps the next step is to station border controls around the yacht club.
Still, both men are, in their own ways, anxious about identity — that slippery British obsession. What is England? A flag? A queue? A warm beer? A complicated census form?
Maybe the country isn’t vanishing at all. Maybe it’s just doing what it has always done: absorbing, arguing, reinventing — and occasionally exporting its loudest patriots to places with better weather and lower capital gains.
For more than 100 years Brits colonised the rest of the world.
Now the rest of the world is colonising Britain.
Where’s the problem?
I always knew it would happen. Britain had a huge empire and now thousands of people are flocking to the mother country. Enoch Powell the great old racist hypocrite yearned to be made Viceroy of India. Think about the irony of that. Keir Starmer actually quoted from his infamous rivers of blood speech and now he is criticising Jim Ratcliffe for saying more or less the same thing. Enoch just didn’t like black people. He had to get elected in a safe unionist seat when he became persona non grata across the water. I would love to have seen his face when he heard there was a black preceptory march planned.